Every year when summertime hits, I start in with the full-on “Somewhere That’s Green”-esque daydreams in which I fantasize about what a joyous convenience it would be to have my very own non-HOA-scrutinized backyard complete with a nifty outdoor clothesline — somewhere where I could hang all of my damp clothes to dry instead of hoarding quarters for the dryers at the laundromat down the street. What low-impact domestic bliss! And then I wake up and remember that I live in a fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn without a backyard — or a clothesline — to call my own.

To be clear, I don’t even have that much space to dry my laundry indoors. I do own a collapsible umbrella drying rack — for a brief spell, I hauled it up and down from my roof — but it’s simply too awkward and too large to be temporarily installed anywhere in my apartment. Even finding a place to store the thing is difficult (hello there, first-world problems).

People living in small apartments lack the floor space to comfortably accommodate a laundry drying rack. Drying machines, on the other hand, use a lot of electricity and cause a significant amount of carbon dioxide to be emitted into the atmosphere. Blindry combines a window blind with a fold-down laundry drying rack function. Sunlight can be used to dry one’s laundry and floor space is left unhindered.

Brilliant. The winner of a red dot award for design concept in the home furniture category, Blindry instantly reminds me of Volet Végétal, but reversed and meant for soggy knickers instead of fresh herbs. The design is quite simple: an outer frame fits around the interior of a window while an inner frame complete with clothes-hanging blinds/slates folds down into a horizontal position when it’s laundry time. Of course, given that windows come in myriad shapes and sizes, manufacturing and installing Blindry could get tricky. Still, I love the idea.